inessential musings

In a word…

Dubbed “The World’s Thinnest Notebook,” the MacBook Air fills a gap between the existing MacBook and MacBook Pro, but introduces a new way of looking at how a laptop fits your mobile lifestyle.

First, the thing is thin: .76 to .16 inches thick, back to front, with a magnetic latch. It sports a full size backlit keyboard, a full size 13.3” LED backlit widescreen, built in iSight camera, a large trackpad that recognizes several new multi-touch gestures (owing to the iPhone’s touchscreen technology), 1.8” hard drives, (80 GB standard, 64 GB SSD optional), 2 gig of memory, 1.6 GHz or 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processors (but in a 60% smaller package!) - a complete Mac on a board the size of a pencil, an amazing feat of engineering.

On one side, Apple’s magsafe power connector. On the other side, a door for one USB port, a micro DVI and a headphone jack. 802.11n networking, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR. Weighs 3 pounds with claimed battery life of 5 hours!

Built to be a wireless machine, the Air has no internal optical drive (a $99 accessory optical Superdrive is offered for those who feel they need one.) Instead, a new feature — “remote disc” - shows you Macs or PCs in your vicinity, allowing you to choose one of those machines and “borrow” it’s optical drive. It appears on your desktop just like a local optical drive and works the same way.

Ships in two weeks @ $1799. Watch the new ad and take a guided tour to check out how it looks and works.

There were, of course, more announcements in Steve’s keynote address. I’ll try to touch on them over the lunch hour or this afternoon.

Update on Jan 15, 2008 at 01:35PM by

Doug

Okay, here’s a quick rundown on the rest of Steve Jobs announcements during this morning’s Macworld keynote address. And it’s now available for viewing for those who want to hear it from Steve himself…

Time Capsule — A backup appliance that works seamlessly with Time Machine to automatically and wirelessly back up everything on one or more Macs running Mac OS X Leopard. Combining an 802.11n base station with a server grade hard disk in one small package, it automatically - and wirelessly - backs up all the Macs in your house every hour. Available in models featuring 500GB and 1TB hard drives for $299 and $499, respectively.

iPhone Software Update 1.1.3 - A free software update via iTunes 7.5 or later, enables iPhone customers to automatically find their location using the redesigned Maps application; text message multiple people in one message; create Web Clips for their favorite websites; customize their home screen; and watch movies rented from the new iTunes Movie Rentals on their iPhone.

iTunes Movie Rentals - Allows customers to rent movies for as little as $2.99 and watch them on their Macs or PCs, all current generation iPods, iPhones and Apple TV. Featuring movies from all the major movie studios, iTunes will offer more than 1,000 movie titles by the end of February, including over 100 titles featuring stunning high definition video with 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound. Movies can be rented directly from a widescreen TV using Apple TV.

New software, lower price for Apple TV - Rent movies on the iTunes Store directly from widescreen TVs, no computer required, just click a button on the remote.

iTunes Digital Copy - Twentieth Century Fox and Apple have partnered to provide customers who purchase a DVD of a Fox movie title with an additional Digital Copy of the movie that can be transferred to iTunes and then viewed on a PC or Mac, iPod with video, iPhone or on Apple TV, just like a movie purchased and downloaded from the iTunes Store.

Some are already carping that there wasn’t enough “gee whiz” in the keynote. For crissake, folks, there wasn’t any way to top last year’s address! I would have liked to see GPS in the iPhone, and definitely G3 internet browsing, but they did add a second tier to Google’s triangulation, so Maps may work like a charm. And there will likely be more announcements during the year, right?